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Ruin redux

A former station in Lille, France has become the latest depot for Detroit-based artist Scott Hocking. “Babel,” his site-specific installation for the Lille 3000: Renaissance festival earlier this year, explores the cycle of ruin within cities—without judgment.

“Why do we look at some ruins with reverence, and see others as failures?,” Hocking has said. “Why can’t we realize that we’ve been creating things since the dawn of time, making structures and objects with our hands, and at some point they decay, at some point the civilization that made it fails, at some point the city in which it was made disappears? It’s not the end—there’s never an ending. So maybe there’s a certain countering to the idea that this is the end of something, that this is a failed city, or a failed industrial age. I just see it as a constant cycle that we’re in the middle of. I just try to find the beauty in all the stages.”